PostDeploy as a Google Analytics alternative
PostDeploy counts your visitors without cookies, so no consent banner and no declined-consent blind spot, and the same plan watches uptime, cron jobs and errors. Google Analytics is free and deeper on advertising attribution. Pick PostDeploy when you want the traffic answer plus monitoring, without the banner.
What Google Analytics sells
Google Analytics is Google's web analytics product: event-based measurement, advertising integrations and BigQuery export, free of charge for standard properties.
Side by side, before you commit
Their published free tier against what you get on PostDeploy, because that is where the decision starts.
| Google Analytics | PostDeploy | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (standard properties) | $5 a month after the trial |
| Cookies and consent banner | First-party cookies; consent needed in the EU | No cookies, no banner |
| User-level data retention | 2 or 14 months on standard properties | 1095 days on Scale |
| Setup | Tag, consent tooling, banner | One script tag |
| Uptime, cron and error tracking | Not offered | Included on every plan |
| Advertising attribution and BigQuery export | Included | Not offered |
Why people look for a Google Analytics alternative
Google Analytics sets cookies, so an EU audience means a consent banner, and every visitor who declines disappears from your numbers.
User-level data retention on standard properties is capped at 14 months, and that cap limits explorations and funnel reports.
The answer you open it for, how many people visited and from where, sits under layers of advertising-oriented reports.
It measures the site. It does not tell you the site is down or the nightly job stopped.
What Google Analytics does well
Google Analytics is free at any traffic volume and goes far deeper on marketing: audiences, advertising attribution, BigQuery export and cross-device reporting, none of which PostDeploy has.
Where PostDeploy is different
No consent banner for analytics. PostDeploy sets no cookies, stores no raw IP and keeps no persistent visitor identifier, so the count includes the visitors a banner would lose.
The traffic answer in one screen: pageviews, custom events and referrers per project, without report navigation.
Monitoring on the same plan: 20 uptime monitors, 20 cron jobs and 10,000 error events a month on Indie, next to the visitor numbers.
Retention that outlives 14 months on paid plans, kept as your data, not an advertising signal.
What switching gets you
Try PostDeploy if
- Your audience is in the EU and the consent banner costs you visitors and data.
- You open analytics to answer one question: is the site getting traffic, and from where.
- You also need to know the site is up and the scheduled jobs ran, and you would rather not add two more tools.
- You do not run advertising campaigns that need attribution.
What moving actually costs
- 1 Swap the tag: remove the gtag or Tag Manager snippet and add the PostDeploy analytics script per project.
- 2 Remove the consent banner for analytics if nothing else on the site needs one.
- 3 Event taxonomies simplify: PostDeploy counts pageviews and named custom events. Advertising attribution, audiences and BigQuery export have no PostDeploy equivalent.
- 4 Historical data stays in Google Analytics. Export what you need before any property is deleted.
- 5 Then point the rest of the project at the same login: uptime checks for the URLs and one curl line per scheduled job.
Questions
Is PostDeploy free like Google Analytics?
The trial includes Pro-size allowances with no credit card, plus uptime, cron and error tracking. Indie keeps 100,000 analytics events a month for $5 when the trial ends.
Do I still need a cookie banner with PostDeploy?
Not for analytics. PostDeploy sets no cookies and stores no raw IP or persistent visitor identifier. If other tools on your site set cookies, those still need consent.
Can PostDeploy replace Google Analytics for an ecommerce funnel?
No. PostDeploy counts pageviews and custom events; it has no funnels, audiences or advertising attribution. It fits sites that want the traffic answer plus uptime, cron and error coverage.
Other comparisons
Ship your next project with one toolkit, not three.
Start a trial, run both PostDeploy and Google Analytics for real, and keep whichever answers your questions faster.
Start your 30-day free trial